John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Madelyn Kearns from Medical Practice Insider is reporting that we might see meaningful use stage 3 regulations before HIMSS. Here’s the exact quote from Robert Anthony, deputy director of CMS’ quality measurement and health assessment group:

“We will have two regulations that will come out in time to discuss meaningful use”

It’s hard to imagine that one of these 2 regulations will not be meaningful use stage 3. No doubt CMS and ONC will want to get some feedback from the HIMSS community on meaningful use stage 3. What better place than at the conference?

Madelyn aptly points out that Robert Anthony already has one session scheduled at HIMSS to discuss the meaningful use stage 3 requirements. I have a feeling that is going to be one of the really well attended sessions. Especially if the MU stage 3 rule does come out before HIMSS.

I realize that CMS is bound by laws on when they can announce the various rules and regulations, but I hope they’ve planned out the timeline better than they’ve done in the past. My colleague Neil Versel at Meaningful Health IT News has regularly pointed out how the rules always seem to go public on a Friday. He’s hypothesized that it was the case that they were trying to hide something. I think that’s true for many Washington news stories, but I think it was coincidence in meaningful use’s case.

Even worse than a Friday is the Friday before HIMSS. Talk about ruining the weekend before HIMSS. Although, if I remember right one time they announced the rule in the middle of HIMSS. I remember meeting with a number of EHR vendor’s government relations people who were grumbling about the late night reading of the meaningful use rule that they’d be consuming all night in the middle of the craziness of HIMSS.

Hopefully CMS has learned from past experience and has planned properly to be able to announce the meaningful use stage 3 rule well before HIMSS. Doing so will give people time to look over the rule so they can have a meaningful discussion of the rule at HIMSS as opposed to some frenetic review of what’s been proposed.

Either way, I’m very interested to see what meaningful use stage 3 will look like. My prediction is that it won’t be dramatically different from stage 2. It will be more of the same with maybe 1-2 additions. It’s too bad, because I’d still love to see them blow up meaningful use. Every doctor I know would love to see that as well. Instead I think we’ll be saying “more of the same.”